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User blog:NOBODY/Icebreaker page improvements for mobile users + Article Greenlight: Spoken language
Hello all! If you have been here a long time, you will notice how I tend to fit multiple blog posts into one blog post. This blog post will cover a better mobile experience for Icebreaker pages on the Nitrome Wiki, and whether an article I wrote can be an official article. Improving Icebreaker iOS articles for mobile viewers Icebreaker A Viking Voyage was released on June 20th 2013 - a month and a half ago (from when I wrote this), and it was really popular. As soon as it came out, I went straight to work writing down walkthroughs and putting down videos. 2 weeks later - it was done, video and text walkthroughs for most levels of Icebreaker iOS. Now, since it is a mobile game, likely most people going to the page will be people on their iPhone. Fortunately, you can see what it looks like, as Wikia offers an option to see pages as Mobile viewers see it. How do you do it? Simply put ?useskin=wikiamobile at the end of the URL. I shrunk my screen down to 320 x 480 see how the Hammerfest page looked, and it was okay, but not really helpful. Here were the errors I found when viewing the Hammerfest page: *Text descriptions in the level box go off the page, and have to be viewed while moving a scroll bar *Collapsible boxes are already collapsed *Viewing a video causes you to view a video at a very small resolution. Due to Angry Birds Nest's promoting of themselves in the video, the green Angry Birds piggy takes up most of the videos, causing you unable to see the video. You can't remove it either. A few weeks later, I viewed the Hammerfest and Troll Marsh pages in the Opera web browser using an Archos 43, and I experienced some new problems, along with all the above problems except the last one. These new problems I experienced was: *Videos do not play. I press the play button of a video, a light blue box goes around the area I press. The video doesn't play, but instead, takes me to the file page, where the video also isn't present. I think this may be because the Archos 43 I used has problems playing video - even with the Youtube app from the Google Play store videos fail to play. *The text walkthrough part of the level template, the text in this section extends off the page, and the page cannot be scrolled to see it. Ouch. *''Immensely'' long loading times. I had to wait 40 seconds for all Hammerfest levels to load, and 1 minutes 40 seconds for all Troll Marsh levels to load. I couldn't move while they were loading, either. So with this in mind, I would like to suggest some changes: *We split level sections into their own article. Now, I know this will cause an immense amount of tiny article, but it will be easier for people to get to a desired page, without having to wait an unbearably long time to view information. **We go back to the regular look of a bold heading, a full colon, then non-bold information after this, then the next bold heading, full colon, and non-bold text under this heading (no indent) way of categorizing important level information. *If we do the above, level sections should become an index - with a level's name and its icon. **Or, just the level icons and no level names. Everyone will likely be able to get around easily this way, as they will likely remember a level's icon more than its name. This also helps people whose game is not the US version. This method can also be used if slowness still persists on a mobile phone. *Not use video template - they are collapsed when you view the page on mobile Finally, if you have a mobile phone, consider going to either the Hammerfest, Troll Marsh, or Under Dwell page and sharing your experience in the comments, especially putting down what were negative parts. Article Greenlight: Spoken language Throughout many Nitrome games, you would have likely heard characters speaking English, or in the case of Off the Rails - Spanish. If English is a foreign language to you (and quite likely it is), then you are probably thinking "What are they saying!?". Well, for the reason of documenting all spoken language in a Nitrome game, I've made a page about it - titled Spoken language. This page explains what English is spoken and at what event it happens. I thought this article would be helpful. Now, would it be okay if I made this an official article? I need support for this, so if you could say what needs fixing in the article, or whether it can be an article now, that would be great. I found writing this article was fun, as it was fun to write down all the incorrectly pronounced words in games. Link to article. What you can do For the Icebreaker mobile situation: *Read the problems I faced and determine whether they warrant a change in templates *Check either the Hammerfest, Troll Marsh, or Under Dwell page and report your experience and what problems you find For the Spoken language article: *Read the article, see if it is okay to be an actual article *Suggest things to be added/removed (if any) Category:Blog posts